ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapolitics

Global disorder, the left, & a new democracy

The following is something I wrote a while back that I have not had a chance to do anything with. I’m sharing it here simply because it will otherwise languish. It is a reflection on the political left and its failings in a changing global situation, a situation marked by inequality on a global scale, by increasing, if sometimes inchoate, demands for democracy — from the “color revolutions” of the post-Soviet world to the “Arab Spring” and beyond — and by a shift from a unipolar political economy to something more ambiguous and uncertain.

It is in part a reiteration of the argument against “economistic Marxism,” but it goes beyond that to articulate a revised vision of democracy that comes from the Peircian process-relational philosophy I have been developing on this blog (and in print). It is work in progress; comments are welcome.

Personal background

For over 30 years I’ve located myself mostly on the political left. It’s always been more specific than that for me — the anti-authoritarian left (I’ve called myself an anarchist since I was 16, and while my ideals have relaxed somewhat, I still lean that way), the green or decentralist left (with the first term sometimes taking precedence over the second), the progressive left (despite a few caveats regarding “progress”), the poststructural left (when among academics who understand what that means), the radical-democratic left (when needing a punchier label for something that remained all too inchoate), the social-democratic left (when feeling a little exhausted by reality), the animist or pantheist left (when politics just didn’t seem enough). But it has always been left.

There are two main reasons for that. One is that I have identified with the historical trajectory of social progress that has given working class people, women, non-whites, and various others the kinds of rights that the best-off in society have taken for granted. Even if elitism sometimes seems easier and more attractive, I believe there is no excuse, at this point in history, to deny basic rights to some among us while upholding inequalities that benefit only a few.

The other reason is that I believe that the critical analysis of capitalism — and the containment of its excesses — is indispensible to meliorating the conditions of modern (and postmodern) industrial society. Capitalism turns things — arguably all things, if it’s allowed to do that — into exchangeable commodities, and it institutionalizes greed in ways that negatively affect social as well as ecological relations. That doesn’t mean that a single and specific alternative to capitalism is always and everywhere preferable, or that such an alternative even exists. But it does mean that some form of social, democratic oversight over capitalist economic practices is necessary in order for human society to flourish and prosper. Every left analyst from Marx to Polanyi to Picketty has agreed on that.

The left today is both in crisis and not. Some of its key ideas — notably around the egalitarianism contained in the first premise above — are widely shared, at least on paper, in western liberal democracies. Others — notably those pertaining to the left’s critique of capitalism — appear to be floundering because the enemy is far too strong. Or, rather, they are inchoately held by many people, but not in a way that has contributed to forging a broad alliance or consensus on what to do about capitalism.

Capitalist markets have undeniably provided benefits to humanity. They have facilitated the creativity that has given us everything from washing machines and refrigerators to affordable world travel to aids drugs to the internet as we know it, with its public accessibility of massive amounts of information on a scale never seen before. Whether and to what extent capitalism is itself responsible for those innovations — or what kind of capitalism — is a debate worth having. But the historical record shows that with the productivity brought about by capitalist market economies have come goods that have changed people’s lives in ways they would not eagerly relinquish.

At the same time, as Picketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes fairly evident, capitalism has often, and perhaps always, propped up inequality among social classes, and it is doing this today on a global scale. That engenders resentment, and resentment gives rise to counter-movements. But rather than coalescing into a democratic force for egalitarian transformation, those counter-movements today appear to be largely directed at fueling conservative and xenophobic forms of resistance to change.

What’s my proposal for dealing with this situation? It is that we recognize two kinds of left — the better known economic left, and another one that concerns itself with meaning, with what matters most to people, and that applies both its critical analysis and its utopian aspirations to the task not of mere economic change, but of self-realization writ large.

The two lefts

First, then, we ought to recognize a significant divergence within the left. Next, we should assess how that divergence intersects with a second, larger, and increasing divergence in global politics.

The first divergence is that between those who see capitalism as the problem, a kind of monolithic enemy that must be opposed worldwide and ultimately eradicated, and those who see capitalist economic relations as one of a complex array of intersectionalities that can align with others in particularly oppressive ways, but that may sometimes align with less oppressive, and even highly desirable, things — for instance, with social welfare (as in the post-world war two “golden age of capitalism,” with its Fordist “compromise” between the state, industry, and labor), or even with social liberation, creativity, and democracy. Capitalism is, in this view, neither monolithic nor singly responsible for all evils.

The first of these views is Marxist and anti-imperialist. In its Marxism, it tends toward what its critics have called “economism,” the view that in the final analysis it’s the economy — and the economic class war between capitalists and everyone else — that ultimately accounts for things.

The second view arises from a confluence of sources, including the New Left of the 1960s, the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s (feminism, environmentalism, indigenous rights, gay rights, the peace movement, et al.), anti-colonial and postcolonial movements and theories (developed by intellectuals in the colonized “developing” world over the past 60 years or so), the Gramscian cultural left (which crystallized in the academic field of cultural studies in the 1960s through the 1980s), and the influence of poststructuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.

This divide between the Marxist left and the “cultural” or “postmodern” left has been frequently commented on. But it has been presented too simply in the past, and there is more to the picture now that has not yet been thought through very well. To understand this “more,” I believe we need to understand the global situation that has emerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the “new world order” of the 1990s, and the post 9-11 rise of China and other powers.

A new global struggle

My belief is that much of the Marxist left remains mired within an anti-imperialism — as Ari Paul and Michael Brooks describe it, and that articles like this display all too clearly — that takes its frame of reference from the cold war. The U.S., for these anti-imperialists, is the single global superpower and it must be opposed at all costs.

The problem with this view is not just that it is too simple in every respect, but that the world is moving beyond it. While there have been moments — such as after George W. Bush’s declaration of the war on terror, when it seemed the world had unified against this imperial overreach — the U.S. does not function on its own, nor is it as homegeneous as this model suggests.

To the extent that there is a global capitalist class that is waging war against social equality — something akin to Hardt and Negri’s “empire” — that class is not really identifiable with a single superpower anymore. And since the economic crisis of 2008, the world is arguably moving more in a direction that is both more multipolar and dipolar but in a new way.

In its multipolarity we find new powers like China, Russia, Brazil and its South American allies, Iran, India, and others emerging and forming new alliances and constellations. (Note China’s economic imperialism in Africa, for instance, or Russia’s muscle-flexing in Ukraine, the Arctic, and now Syria.) More importantly, the “political poles” of this emerging multipolar order are finding new alliances with “cultural poles” that are novel, global, and somewhat uncharted.

What I mean by this is that political-economic power is becoming intertwined with cultural power in interesting and poorly understood ways. Where capitalism was once easy to identify with social conformity — think the Organization Man of the 1950s — and socialism with social progress, today that is not only not the case any more — it is half-century out of date. At the same time, the opposite view — that capitalism undermines all social traditions while socialism (or whatever alternative one posits) somehow maintains them — is not true either, nor has it ever been particularly true.

What is happening, however, is that so-called “cultural issues” — from ethnic identity to religious fundamentalism to gay rights to immigration — have come to the forefront in a wide array of social and political conflicts around the world.

Traditional economistic leftists insist that these are secondary and epiphenomenal issues — that they only distract people from the real issues, which are always economic. But these “cultural” issues are the ones that give people meaning in ways that economic analysis cannot account for.

Scholars are well aware that some of them — national or ethnic identity, or religion — remain potent sources of conflict. But the list is arguably much broader than that now, including such things as family farming, church and temple going, coal mining, lovemaking, burqa wearing, deer or whale hunting, potlatching and sweatlodging, bike riding, animal loving, transgendered cross-dressing, punk rocking and hip hopping, local foods (or steak) eating, and a lot of other things people do.

In other words, these are the kinds of things into which people are willing to invest time and energy, and over which they are willing to fight. Some of them are closely related to survival and subsistence, but many are not. They all concern the ways we live and how we define ourselves and others. In this sense they concern the politics of identity.

But “identity” is too limiting a term. Most of those who act in defense of environmental causes, human rights, indigenous rights, or community self-determination do not do so because of their identity as such-and-such (environmentalist, human rightsist, et al.). Some do; but most do it in order to build a better world.

A better term, then, is “the politics of meaning.” And this terrain of meaning is the staging ground for dreaming and building the future of humanity on a planet that is increasingly interconnected.

Struggles over meaning

This is where we cannot ignore the differences between social liberals and social conservatives in the U.S. and claim — as the anti-imperialist left often seems to assert — that all are either part of, or duped by, the “ruling class,” that homogeneous strand of capitalism that disseminates its ideology through a homogeneous “mainstream media.”

It is this cultural terrain that accounts for the growing convergence between Europe’s increasingly prominent right-wing political groups and Russia’s efforts to cultivate a new “Eurasian” conservative bloc. Russia’s radical conservatives have far more in common with U.S. radical conservatives — for instance, in the social/religious wing of the Republican/Tea Party — than they do with the anti-imperialist leftists who implicitly have supported them in debates over Ukraine and Russia.

Democracy — the movement of “people power” that underlies, at least in part, many of the more interesting political upheavals of the last 25 years — is itself a site of social struggle. It’s not a given, for instance, that all forms of “people power” are socially liberal: Islamists from Turkey to Tunisia would like to see greater democracy lead to greater rights for the cultural expression of Islamic values. But insofar as they are genuinely democratizing — that is, insofar as they open up the socius to greater expression of views and practices than have heretofore been allowed — they can be progressive in their effects. That doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t be reterritorialized (in Deleuze & Guattari’s sense) into a new form of conformity or social order. Neither of these is automatic, and so both impulses — the deterritorializing and the reterritorializing — are open to change and contestation.

The same can be said for pro- and anti-European sentiments. In Ukraine, being “pro-European” generally means being for democracy and against corrupt authoritarian rule. On the far right, however, it can mean upholding racialist “white European” values. Alternatively, being pro-European can mean (as it does for the Russian far right) being pro-gay, liberal, anti-traditional, etc. — which is why many Russians see Europe as the enemy. “Europe,” as the most recent EU elections showed, is a contested zone.

It’s no coincidence that both the far left and the far right in Europe tend to be “euroskeptics,” but also no coincidence that the far right has gained more from euroskepticism than the far left. This is precisely my point: the left has not taken enough account of the struggle for cultural power and meaning — which is separate from the struggle for political power.

Redefining democracy

As I see it, there are two main axes around which hegemonic struggle (in a Gramscian sense) is being waged in the world today. One of these is the axis of equality/inequality; the other is the axis of self-realization/oppression.

Capitalism, in this perspective, is not necessarily negative on both counts. It can bolster inequalities even as it spreads the possibilities for liberation of, say, women or sexual minorities. And anti-capitalism is also not necessarily positive: it can engender new oppressions even as it delimits the possibilities for capitalist penetration of the life-world.

What this means is that the anti-imperialism of the cold war left is inadequate for understanding what is happening in the world. The Euro-American power bloc is not behind every ethnically or religiously tinted political development in the world, from Turkey’s Islamists to India’s BJP to Ukraine’s Maidan revolution. To argue that it is risks obfuscating what is actually happening in these countries. At the same time, it is not always socialism that drives anti-colonial movements, movements for indigenous control over land, and so on. (But when socialism blends with anarcho-decentralism, as with the Kurdish communities in Syria, there is hope that is hard to find in what otherwise appears a quagmire.)

To enable a more viable definition of democracy, one rooted in process-relational thinking, I would like to redefine it this way:

Democracy is the process by which people in general and as a whole enhance their capacities for living fulfilling, individually and collectively self-realizing lives.

That which enhances these capacities for people in general is democratic. That which diminishes it is anti-democratic. That which enhances it for some but not others is neutral. And that which enhances it for some at the expense of others is anti-democratic — since the definition requires that capacities be increased for people “in general and as a whole,” meaning that democracy is being defined socially and collectively here for the entirety of the social group in question.

The focus here on self-realization is less about the “self” — which, in a process-relational view, is always an open process, never a completed achievement or even something known in advance — than it is about “realization.”

The theoretical basis for this term (for me) comes from the Peircian process-relational theory that I have been developing. Recall that in that framework, the triad aesthetics-ethics-logic is rooted in the primary logical-metaphysical triad of firstness-secondness-thirdness. A “first” is a thing in and of itself, irrespective of its relations with anything else; a “second” is an actual relational encounter between firsts, the kind of thing that causes further action, and that scientists study as causally consequential; a “third” is a meaningful habit or pattern made of such causal relations (or seconds). A first, in the eco-ethico-aesthetics of what a bodymind can do, is something to be observed and appreciated; a second — something that is acted; and a third — something realized.

Politics consists of the study and informed engagement with relations between persons (or “becoming-selves”). It is in this sense a matter of thirdness — the interpretation and generation of patterns — about secondnesses, that is, about relations that are ethically imbued all the way through.

Democracy is, in this sense, always in progress, always contested, and yet actually achievable in a moment-to-moment sense. It enables the experience of power in a Foucauldian sense — more power-to and power-with than power-over — of self-determination and self-fashioning, of accountability for one’s actions, and of a sense of fulfillment. It can be political — achievable, for instance, through organizing, street mobilization, party building, campaigning, electioneering, policy making, and so on. But it can also be cultural — achievable through artistic performance, music making, religious practice, and whatever other forms people may use to achieve that sense of individual or collective self-realization.

With its roots in Gramscian counter-hegemony theory, the cultural left has always understood these things better than the economistic left. But in a changing international order, this insight requires constant reinterpretation and application to new contexts, signs, symbols, and realities. We need to understand what it is about Islamism (in Turkey or Tunisia), about nationalism (in Ukraine or India), about indigenism (in a variety of contexts), or about “Russian” or “European” values that appeals to people, and how to speak to the desires of those they appeal to so as to keep them in conversation with parallel desires elsewhere. It is in the building of those parallelisms — and the ensuring that they do not trample over others’ parallel desires — that democracy is made stronger, richer, more vibrant, and more universal.

If the left loses sight of the things that give people meaning, it abdicates this vast territory — arguably the territory of greatest concern to most humans — to the political and cultural right. That, for the left, would be devastating.

But if it reclaims that terrain, it can give rise to a cosmopolitics that would connect the economic struggles that continue to structure our world to the cultural struggles that define that world for most people and most communities today. And if it regains the open-ended positivity of that kind of vision — as opposed to, say, a vision of resentment, animosity, jealousy, and grievance — then it gains the power to win converts via the imagination, which is, after all, the most powerful vehicle for political action that there is.